One Song One Doodle #2 RAIN DOGZ

Illustrating "Rain Dogz" by Mothra 🎶🖍️ | MC #56

Hiya!

I hope your October was fine. Mine was mostly filled with making plans for this last quarter of the year, working on new products for theCode.xyz, and enjoying an exceptionally warm start to Autumn ☀️ But it wasn’t all sunshine and roses. My dog Gonzo got sick, and I had an eye infection that made me drop screen for a few days.

Okay, without further ado, let’s move forward to today’s featured song and doodle.

One Song, One Doodle

🎶 Mothra - "Rain Dogz"

Listen on Spotify | Listen on YouTube

• Oldschool hip hop vibe - Checked ✔️

• Sounds of nature? - Checked ✔️

• Oriental motifs? - Checked ✔️

• Dogs? - Checked ✔️

I have weak spots for all of the above, so this song must have caught my attention.

There’s not much info about Mothra out there. I only managed to find out that it’s a Russian trip-hop band from Samara, that’s creating since 2007. According to Mothra’s Soundcloud page, the earliest track they released there, was made about 12 years ago. It was a hard dubstep with heavy, brutal bass titled accurately - “DOOMSDAY” . Their last release was an album called “Re: Movement” (2017) with “Rain Dogz” on it.

In Mothra’s description on ReverbNation, you can read: “Where words fail, music speaks”, and on Bandcamp: “We know what we are, but know not what we may be”. They haven’t been active on their social media since 2021, so we don’t know what’s their take on the ongoing war in Ukraine. After listening to the song “Skip (People)” from Mothra’s “Re: Movement” (2017) album I only hope they believe in its lyrics, a sample from “Into The Wild” (2007) movie, that’s about being sick of society:

Christopher McCandless (Emile Hirsch): You know what I don’t understand? I don’t understand why people why every f***ing person is so bad to each other so f**ing often it doesn’t make sense to me. Judgment. Control. All that, the whole spectrum

Wayne Westerberg (Vince Vaughn): What "people" we talking about? What people?

— dialogue from “Into The Wild” (2007) movie

It’s not the only film dialogue used on this album. You can find in there also other samples from another brilliant movie, like “Waking Life” (2001) used in the “Existence” song.

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Ok, enough of that.

I also did some research on what the title of this song might mean? 🤔💭

Apparently, there’s this English-language idiom “Raining dogs and cats” 🐕🐈‍⬛🌧️, that I wasn’t familiar with.

“There may not be a logical explanation; the phrase may have been used just for its nonsensical humor value, or to describe particularly heavy rainfall, like other equivalent English expressions ("raining pitchforks", "raining hammer handles")”

— Wikipedia

How exciting it was, when I found out there are tons of similarly crazy sayings for heavy rain in other languages. Let me serve you a little sample:

Afrikaans | dit reën ou meide/vrouens/anties met knopkieries | it's raining old tribal women/women/aunts with knobsticks 👵

Albanian | po bën Zoti shurrën | God is taking a piss 😇

Cantonese | 落狗屎 | it's raining dog's poo 💩

Croatian | padaju sjekire | axes dropping 🪓

Danish | regner skomagerdrenge | raining shoemakers' apprentices 👞

Kannada | ಮುಸಲಧಾರೆ, ಕುಂಭದ್ರೋಣ ಮಳೆ | a stream of mallets 🔨

Norwegian | det regner trollkjerringer | raining she-trolls 🧌

Portugese | está a chover chouriços | it's raining chorizos 🇵🇹

Punjabi | ਨਿਆਣੇ-ਕੁੱਟ ਮੀਂਹ | rain that beats kids 🚸

Spanish | está cayendo la del pulpo | (the rain) is hitting us like they hit an octopus 🐙

Spanish (Colombia)| estan lloviendo maridos | raining husbands 🤵‍♂️

Swedish | det regnar smådjävlar | raining little devils 😈

— Wikipedia

In Polish, we have a saying "Leje jak z cebra", which means "pouring like from a bucket". 🪣🌧️ According to Wikipedia, we have also another idiom - "rzuca żabami", which means “[the rain/it] is throwing frogs” 🐸🌧️, but I never heard anyone saying this.

And what do you call heavy rain in your part of the world? Let me know in the comment section!

Another explanation is that the title might be inspired by Tom Waits's song "Rain Dogs"…

According to 1985 interviews, Tom saw the phrase "Rain Dogs" as metaphor for lost human beings, people in pain with no sense of direction. People who sleep in doorways, people who don't have a social or physical place to belong.

— Songfacts

Either way, I really enjoy listening to this one. I hope you’ll like it too.

Listen on Spotify | Listen on YouTube

🖍️ Doodle

Illustrating this was a quick, and careless process, that gave me lots of fun. Drawing animals, especially dogs, is one of my favorite things to do, so it was a pure pleasure. What I really love about doodling is that it’s meant to be raw, authentic, and mind-emptying with effects far from perfect. There's no pressure, no limits, no overthinking involved in it.

When English isn’t your first language understanding stuff from hearing may be sometimes a bit tricky. Our minds have this magical tendency to make saving-energy shortcuts and stuff like that. You may have noticed that on my drawing there’s this quote: “Every dog has its name”. This is what I tend to hear when listening to “Rain Dogz”, until it came to me it’s in fact the famous saying - “Every dog has his day”. That quote has been used in Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”, De Palma’s “Scarface”, and in in everyday speech for decades. It means that success is available to each one of us, and will happen at some point in life.

“Rain Dogz” - the title of Mothra’s song taken quite seriously as raining dogs

Happy Wednesday!
Yours,